Wednesday, April 16, 2014

A
few of our authors have come together to share a variety of articles and items
of interest on their blogs for your enjoyment. There are some lovely giveaway
prizes, and – to stay in keeping with the Spring and rebirth theme at this time
of year – some colourful Easter eggs. Feel free to collect the eggs, and use
them where you like. They were drawn by SilverWood author Peter St John who
writes the ‘Gang’ series about a boy who was evacuated to a village near
Ipswich during WWII. Meet Peter and his characters on the Blog Hop, along with
a host of eggcellent SilverWood authors.

To find their blogs follow the links at the bottom of the page.(Links will be live from 17 April 2014.)

And here is my blog...The Female Writer's Apology; Or, Then and Now

In
my eighteenth-century thriller, To The
Fair Land, Ben Dearlove’s adventures start when he tries to find the
anonymous author of a book about a voyage to the South Seas. His first clue to
the writer’s identity is the realisation that the book cannot be by a woman
because:

“No
woman ever launched a volume on the world without apologising for it first. ‘Took up my pen with no thought of
publication... Nothing but the necessity to provide for a young family could
have induced me to lay this trifle before the public... Beg the reader will
look kindly upon it for all its demerits.’ ” (Chapter 5).

Why
did this detail matter to me?

Partly,
of course, because it reflects a view that Ben would very likely have held:
women couldn’t write serious books. It also says something about the
eighteenth-century literary scene. It was common practice for writers to preface
their books with a modest disclaimer about its literary worth, which was
usually a sly way of proclaiming its merits: “it’s not very good, but...”

Sheridan’s
preface to The Rivals is a long apology
for the defects of an earlier draft of the play, which he says fully deserved
criticism. Few writers, he adds, “do not wish to palliate the faults which they
acknowledge” and “second their confession of its deficiencies, by whatever plea
seems least disgraceful to their ability” – his plea is inexperience. Even so,
Sheridan has enough confidence to refer to his “ability” and to defend his work
from “little puny critics” who are “spleen-swoln”.

William
Godwin, in an introduction to the 1831 edition of St Leon, originally published in 1799, refers to the “diffidence”
which kept him from attempting another novel after the publication of Caleb Williams in 1794. Evidently, he
got over it. In his preface to Tom Jones,
Henry Fielding asks the reader “that he will not expect to find perfection in
this work;...and...that he will excuse some parts of it, if they fall short of
that little merit which may appear in others”. At the same time, had he “been
sensible of any great demerit in the work” he would not have sought patronage
for it.

Even
when mocking the parade of false modesty, writers were rarely able to stray from
it. In his memoirs, bookseller James Lackington, ostensibly rejecting the custom
of pointing out his “weaknesses and imperfections”, self-deprecatingly would consider
himself “amply rewarded” if the reader deems his memoir “not the worst” ever
written. For all that, he claims there is merit in his work. It shows what can be
achieved by “a persevering habit of industry, and an upright conscientious demeanour
in trade”.

Samuel
Richardson’s own trumpet-blowing in Pamela
– “he thinks any apology for it unnecessary” – seems almost refreshing by comparison.
Almost.

There
was one thing the men never apologised for, and that was their gender. When a woman took up her pen she had to come
up with a good excuse for trespassing on male territory. There was nothing frivolous
about this, even if the excuses were often thin. A common one was the need to
earn a living. Elizabeth Inchbald in A
Simple Story says she was driven to write by “Necessity! – thou, who art
the instigator of so many bad authors and actors”. Charlotte Smith in her
preface to her radical novel Desmond referred
to the “affairs of my family” which forced her to write for money (her
estranged husband claimed her earnings, as he was legally entitled to do), and
she also confronts the criticism that “women...have no business with politics”.

The
ultimate apology a woman could make was anonymity. Of course, many men published
anonymously, for example to avoid prosecution, or to protect their professional
status – Henry Fielding published some works anonymously because he was a
magistrate. However, the male writer had only to hide his name, not his gender.

Sarah
Scott’s Millenium Hall was written by
“A Gentleman on his Travels”. Frances Burney published her first novel Evelina in secret, sparking off an
excited debate about whether the writer was a man or a woman. Revealing their gender
was a serious undertaking for women writers. When Clara Reeve published a
revised edition of The Old English Baron
it was only after a great deal of persuasion and “with extreme reluctance” that
she could “suffer my name to appear in the title page”.

Sarah
Fielding’s authorship of The Adventures
of David Simple was only made known when the rumour got about that her brother
Henry had written the book and he felt the need to defend himself from
accusations of hypocrisy (he had vowed never to publish anonymously). The
second edition revealed Sarah’s authorship, but it was Henry who wrote the
preface which focuses on – Henry.

However, the main reason the detail
mattered to me is that women writers are still concealing their gender. J K
Rowling published her Harry Potter books using initials on the advice of publishers
who said boys would not read the books if they knew a woman wrote them. She
went on to publish her detective novels under a man’s name (there’s a long
tradition for this – the Brontes, George Eliot...). The use of initials by women
authors is common in fantasy, science fiction and thrillers. Manda Scott changed
to M C Scott because, she says, most men do not buy books by women. It’s harder
for women to get their books reviewed too – in March 2013 a Guardian survey
found that 8.7% of books reviewed in
the London Review of Books were by women; 26.1% in the New Statesmen; and 34.1%
in the Guardian. The figures are no better in America, as the VIDA project’s
annual count shows.

Historical fiction is as much about the present as the past. It reflects
our own situation and preoccupations, and for me that’s what makes it relevant.
It’s a way of asking: how much has changed? As Ben Dearlove’s remarks suggest,
for women writers it sometimes seems not very much.

I was intrigued
by the message and the fact that it had been sent to a soldier. It also seemed
to me that it provided a lot of information, and that although Andrews is not
an uncommon surname, the initials “J A R” are. Not really expecting much to
come of it, I did a Google search. To my astonishment, I came upon an entry
about 2nd Lieut Andrews of the 6th Lincolnshire at www.findagrave.com, from which I discovered (inter
alia) that his name was John Alfred Raymond and that he was killed in action on
14 April 1918.

A name, a history, a grave

Suddenly
the addressee ofmy postcard had a name,
a history and, movingly, a grave. But that was not all my Google search
revealed. There was a War Office record about Mr Andrews in the National
Archives at Kew. Any of you who are used to researching soldiers of the First
World War will perhaps not be surprised by this, but it had not occurred to me.

My
curiosity thoroughly piqued by now, I sent off for the record. I won’t go into
the labyrinthine detail of my subsequent research. I had pieced together quite
a bit about John Andrews’s life and death when I discovered that Mr Nicholas
McCarthy of Stamford School was compiling a list of the school’s teachers and
pupils who died during the First World War. John Andrews was on that list.

This
was exciting! I got in touch with Mr McCarthy and he very kindly sent me the
results of his own detailed and thorough research. It included the text of
letters sent to Mr and Mrs Andrews after their son’s death by his commanding
officer and a friend, as well as an obituary from the Stamford and Rutland News.
John Andrews was described as an affable young man, a regular church-goer, popular
with his colleagues, and always “the first to volunteer for dangerous work”.

Mr
McCarthy also sent me a photograph.

This
is 2nd Lieutenant John Alfred Raymond Andrews

The outline of a life: John Alfred
Raymond Andrews

John
Andrews was born in Stamford on 4 June 1896 to Fred Andrews, a solicitor, and
his wife Ada. He had a sister, Ada Phyllis Andrews. They lived in Adelaide
Street, Stamford. He attended Stamford Grammar School between 1909 and 1911 on
a County Scholarship. When he left school he worked as a bank clerk.

He
enlisted as a volunteer into the Queen’s Westminsters in 1916, served in the
trenches, and was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant in the 6th
Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. He was attached to the Royal Air Service, and
after training was posted to No 4 Squadron RAF on 12 April 1918. Only two days
later he was flying as an observer for Lieut Albert Edward Doughty when they
took off from Choques Aerodrome, north west of Bethune. They were both killed
in a flying accident and were buried in Aire Communal Cemetery.

A tribute

John
Alfred Raymond Andrews is no longer just a name on a postcard. I had no idea I
would learn so much about a man I had never heard of and had no connection with.
It seems wondrous that such flimsy, fragile relics can forge links between the
living and the dead. I wonder how the card came into my hands. Where has it
been for the best part of a hundred years? Was it still in his keeping when he
died, and if so what did it mean to him? At what point did it fall away from
the possessions he left behind? Why has it survived – did someone else treasure
it for his sake?

In
a few days it will be the anniversary of the death of 2nd Lieut J A
R Andrews. This blog is a tribute to him and all the men, women and children whose lives
have been sacrificed because of the world’s failure to find a better way of
resolving conflict than going to war. May they rest in peace.

With special thanks to Mr Nicholas McCarthy for the information and the photograph.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.